Left-handed Men See Better Paychecks

August 10, 2006

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Left-handed men, often seen as having an advantage over right-handed counterparts in sports like tennis, also enjoy much better paydays, a new study says.

Left-handed men with at least some college education earned 15 percent more than similarly educated right-handers, while those who finished college earned about 26 percent more, wrote Christopher S. Ruebeck of Lafayette College, and Joseph Harrington and Robert Moffitt of Johns Hopkins University in a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

There are “several suggestive and economically and statistically significant results that suggest further support for the notion that handedness matters,” they wrote. “We do not have a theory that reconciles all of these findings.”

The researchers did not find a similar effect among women.

The data used for the study were hourly earnings taken from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a set of surveys including individuals aged 14-21 in 1979 who were interviewed every year until 1994 and every other year thereafter.

A copy of the working paper can be found at http://papers.nber.org/papers/w12387.pdf